Happy New Year!

I would like to thank everyone who reads my blog and wish you a happy new year.

God Bless,

Doug

Last Trading Day Of The Year - Full Recap

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/31/2013

A year which showed that central planning works (for the fifth year in a row and probably can continue to "work" at least a little longer - in the USSR it surprised everyone with its longevity before it all came crashing down), is drawing to a close. This is what has happened so far on the last trading session of 2013. As market participants head in to the New Year period, volumes are particularly thin with closures being observed across Europe with only the CAC, IBEX and FTSE 100 trading out of the major European indices, with German, Switzerland, Italy and the Nordic countries are already closed. The FTSE and CAC are both trading in the green with BP leading the way for the FTSE earlier in the session after reports the Co. have asked a federal appeals court to block economic loss payments in its settlement of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. European stocks rise, with real estate, travel & leisure leading gains. Retail shares underperform as Debenhams slumps following its IMS. A number of major markets will close early today. The euro falls against the dollar. Fixed income market are particularly quiet with the Eurex being shut. Whilst Gilts are seen down this morning following on from yesterday’s short-covering gains.

Market recap

• S&P 500 futures little changed at 1835.3
• Stoxx 600 up 0.2% to 327.8
• US 10Yr yield up 2bps to 2.99%
• German 10Yr yield little changed at 1.93%
• MSCI Asia Pacific up 0.1% to 141.3
• Gold spot up 0.5% to $1202/oz

EUROPE

• 18/19 sectors rise, led by real estate, travel & leisure
• Greek October Retail Sales Fall 1.9% y/y
• Gainers: CRH +1.9%, Taylor Wimpey +1.8%, Persimmon +1.8%,
• Berkeley Group +1.8%, Land Securities +1.6%, Endesa +1.7%, SBM Offshore +1.5%, Telenet Group +1.4%
• Decliners: Debenhams -10.1%, Banco Comercial Portugues -2.7%, International Personal Finance -2%, Essentra -1.9%, Petrofac -1.9%, Delta Lloyd -1.5%, Inchcape -1.5%, Lonmin -1.4%

ASIA

• Asian stocks rise, with Chinese shares leading gains. Australian shares underperform.
• MSCI Asia Pacific up 0.1% to 141.3
• Nikkei 225 up 0.7%, Hang Seng up 0.3%, Kospi up 0.5%,
• Shanghai Composite up 0.9%, ASX down 0.1%, Sensex up 0.1%
• All 10 sectors rise, led by energy, utilities
• Singapore Economy Grew 3.7% in 2013, Prime Minister Lee Says
• S. Korea’s Dec. Consumer Prices Rise 1.1% Y/y
• Gainers: BBMG Corp +6.6%, GOME Electrical Appliances +5.9%, Synnex Technology International +5.2%, China Gas Holdings +4.2%, Rural Electrification Corp +4.1%, Power Finance Corp +4.1%, Byd Co +4%, NWS Holdings +3.1%
• Decliners: Vangaurd International -3.9%, MMC Corp -3.4%, Parkson Holdings -2.8%, TSRC Corp -2.8%, Taiwan Mobile -2%, Newcrest Mining -1.9%, China Resources Cement -1.9%, Idea Cellular -1.9%

Overnight news bulletin from Bloomberg

• Treasuries decline in the last trade day of the year, 10Y yield holding near 3%, closed at 1.757% on Dec. 31, 2012.
• Treasuries delivered a total return of -2.3% this year, according to BofAML’s U.S. Treasury Index, the first yearly loss since 2009 as Fed scales back bond buys
• U.S. investment-grade corporates lost 1.3% this year while high yield bonds returned 6.8%, also according to BofAML indexes; the S&P 500 rallied 29%, while the DJIA is headed toward its biggest annual gain since 1996
• The yuan rose 2.9% this year, its fourth annual gain in Asia’s best performance for 2013; JPY has fallen 17.4% vs USD while EUR has gained 4.3%
• Gold is headed for the biggest slump in three decades and the first annual loss since 2000; silver is poised for the worst annual performance since 1981
• Latvia becomes the 18th member of the euro area tomorrow even as opponents of the currency switch outnumber proponents two-to-one as public expectations for accelerating inflation mount, opinion polls show
• Fourteen pot shops are scheduled to open in Denver tomorrow, just over a year after Colorado and Washington voters made their states the first to legalize recreational use; Colorado expects $67m in tax revenue
• Sovereign yields mostly higher. Nikkei closed for holiday; Japan reopens Jan. 6. Shanghai +0.9%. U.S. equity-index futures little changed. WTI crude declines, copper little changed, gold rises

Asian Headlines

The PBoC said that China's economy and consumer prices are basically stable and reiterated it is to pursue prudent monetary policy, according to a statement on the Q4 monetary policy committee meeting.

Nomura forecasts 2014 year-end Nikkei 225 average at 18000 and added that the Nikkei 225 could reach 25000 in 2018.

EU & UK Headlines

German Chancellor Merkel says that eliminating the budget deficit is a priority of her third four-year term. (Newswires)

Separately, the German finance minister has said Latvia's joining of the Eurozone will structurally strengthen the monetary union.

Liquidity in the Eurozone area has risen from EUR 200bln to EUR 274.8bln following yesterday's MRO and LTRO operations alongside the ECB's failure to sterilise the aimed quantity in the SMP programme.

ESM has said that the Spain assistance program has expired with a successful exit.

Barclays pan-Euro agg month-end extensions: +0.03y

Barclays Sterling month-end extensions:+0.07y

US Headlines

Fed's Fisher said his votes on the central bank's policy panel in 2014 will reflect his concern that the Fed's bond buying risks stoking inflation and exposing the institution politically.

Barclays US Tsys month-end extensions:+0.07y

Equities

The CAC and FTSE 100 are seen in the green albeit with thin volumes. In terms of stock specific news, BP have asked a federal appeals court to block economic loss payments in ITS USD 9.2bln settlement of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill unless they can be directly linked to the disaster. UK retailers are under pressure after Debenhams' profit warning, with the likes of Sainsburys and Marks and Spencers consequently seeing some downside.

Elsewhere, pre-market it was reported for Sanofi that France may allow substitutes for Co.'s Doliprane, France's most prescribed medicine which led to EUR 276mln of health-system reimbursements in 2012.

FX

In FX markets, EUR is seeing some downside amid signs liquidity in the Eurozone area rising from EUR 200bln to EUR 274.8bln following yesterday's MRO and LTRO operations alongside the ECB's failure to sterilise the aimed quantity in the SMP programme. GBP has managed to benefit from GBP/USD holding above the 1.6500 level. Overnight, JPY continued to strengthen which saw USD/JPY test the 105 handle to the downside. USD/JPY has steadily fallen since yesterday after failing to test 105.50 to the upside where there are large option barriers and a key Fibonacci level. However, there has been little in the way of movement for the pair in the European session.

Commodities

Production resumes at Libya's 25,000 bpd Messla oil field, state-owned National Oil says on its website. China may buy more Iranian oil next year as a state trader is negotiating a new light crude contract that could raise imports from Tehran to levels not seen since tough Western sanctions were imposed in 2012.

Residents of a small town in North Dakota were urged to evacuate after a BNSF train carrying crude oil collided with another train on Monday, setting off a series of explosions and fires, the latest in a string of incidents that have raised alarms over growing oil-by-rail traffic.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will swap about USD 1.4bln in shares of Phillips 66 for full ownership of the energy firm's pipeline-services business, at billionaire Warren Buffett expands his bet on oil transportation.

SPDR Gold Trust said its holdings fell 0.37% to 798.22 tonnes on Monday from 801.22 tonnes on Friday.

MUST-SEE SUNSET PHENOMENON

Like the Moon, Venus has phases, and this week it is a whisper-thin crescent. The phenomenon is easy to observe. Venus is so bright, you can see it at sunset even before the sky fades to black. To the naked eye, Venus looks like an unusually luminous star. A pair of binoculars or a small telescope reveals the planet's crescent shape.

This composite image shows how Venus looks to the naked eye and through a telescope:

The sunset self-portrait was made by Jean-Baptiste Feldmann of Nuits-Saint-Georges, France. The telescopic inset was recorded by Sylvain Weiller of Saint Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, France. "The crescent is becoming very thin," says Weiller. "Venus no longer looks like a planet. It's more like a solar eclipse!"

Venus looks the way it does because it is turning its night side toward Earth. Today, only a 4% sliver of Venus's dayside is visible. On Jan. 11th, Venus will pass almost directly between Earth and the sun. At that moment, called "inferior conjunction," the sliver will almost completely disappear--so catch it now!

Realtime Venus Photo Gallery

A New Year and Old Problems

By Thomas Sowell - December 31, 2013

Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy, and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.

Sometimes we are content to try to change ourselves with New Year's resolutions to do better in some respect. Changing ourselves is a much more reasonable undertaking than trying to change other people. It may or may not succeed, but it seldom creates the disasters that trying to change others can produce.
When we look beyond ourselves to the world around us, peering into the future can be a very sobering, if not depressing, experience.
ObamaCare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover at their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.
What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts' Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.
ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems -- and even catastrophes -- that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.
The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally -- after nearly five long years -- begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.
What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans, and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?
What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings, because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?
With all the time that elapsed between the passage of ObamaCare and its going into effect, why were the so-called "navigators" who were to be handling other people's financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn't care?
Caring is not a matter of words. "By their fruits ye shall know them" -- not by their rhetoric, image or symbolism.
Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year, as the medical, financial and other painful human consequences of ObamaCare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.
The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.
ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.
In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn -- citizens or subjects.
This means that Republicans have to decide whether their top priority is internal strife among the different wings of the party -- another circular firing squad -- or whether either wing puts the country first.
A prediction on how that will turn out in the new year would be far too hazardous to attempt.

The Four Freedoms: 75 Years of Liberal Betrayal

By Christopher Chantrill

In the second half of the 2000s liberals did a fine job of blaming Bush for everything that went wrong in the US. His "neo-con" supporters, they asserted, were just as bad.
Now that President Obama and his signature legislation are a twin disaster the same opportunity beckons for conservatives. It's not just Obama, it's the whole liberal project that created this mess. So the road to 2016 involves discrediting Obama, but also the whole liberal ruling class.
A good place to start would be FDR's Four Freedoms, for when the campaign to elect the un-Obama kicks off in 2016 it will be 75 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled his Four Freedoms on January 6, 1941. In case you forgot, the freedoms were:

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Worship

Freedom from Want

Freedom from Fear

Have you ever thought about how the liberals have utterly betrayed the noble sentiments of the Four Freedoms?
Nothing personal here. It's just that all power corrupts, and liberal power corrupts absolutely.
Let us give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that, then and now, liberals believe what they say they believe in. Even so, for the sake of truth, justice and the American Way, we must look at the liberal record on the Four Freedoms.
The Four Freedoms were famously depicted by Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post, and the first freedom was a painting of an earnest young white working-class man standing up to speak his mind at a public meeting. Today, the only place you get to hear the voices of white working-class men in America, according to Camille Paglia, is on sports radio. And we've just come through a comical episode where the activist group GLAAD, spear-carrier of the liberal cultural elite, got its head handed to it after a gratuitous lunge at the free-speech right of a conservative Christian.
The point is that liberals today stand foursquare against any speech that hasn't been pre-approved by the liberal censors, and they operate blacklists against people that violate liberal speech codes, according to the principle that you'll never get a job in this tinsel-town again. Liberals have utterly betrayed their belief in Freedom of Speech.
When it comes to Freedom of Worship, depicted by Rockwell as an angelic grandmother piously saying her prayers in church, liberals seem to have misinterpreted religious freedom as Freedom from Worship. Today's liberals are united in a war against God-based religion. Except Islam, of course. Why is it that liberals give Islam a pass?
The sick joke is that while liberals declare that God is dead and religion is bigotry and superstition and worry about the least little religious symbol on government land, everything that liberals do and believe creates an establishment of secular religion -- from forcing little children into government secular schools down to the GLAADs and the HRCs and the PETAs filling in for the Spanish Inquisition.
What about Freedom from Want? Surely liberals have been true to their last on that, shoveling trillions of dollars every year at the poor and the helpless. Unfortunately the Newest Poor Laws of the 1960s War on Poverty have been every bit as useless as the old Poor Law of the late 1500s and the New Poor Law of 1834 in getting the poor out of pauperism. Even liberal economist Robert William Fogel admits: today's problem is not material inequality but a "maldistribution of spiritual resources." But Fogel's solution is that

The nation should develop a program to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a "sense of purpose," a "vision of opportunity," a "sense of the mainstream of work and life," a "strong family ethic," "a sense of community," ... a "sense of benevolence," "a sense of discipline," ... and "self-esteem."

The trouble is that government can't do that, never could, never would, and liberals can't bring themselves to admit it. Why? Because government only does force; family and work and benevolence is what religion teaches. See liberals and Freedom of Worship above.
Finally, what about Freedom from Fear? Never mind, liberals were hypocrites about that from the very start. Right after FDR spoke grandly in 1941 about a "world-wide reduction of armaments" he spoke of "this foreign peril" and declared that "the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production." Today the great need is freedom from fear of the IRS, the NSA, and the TSA.
Again, this isn't personal. All power corrupts and fundamental transformation corrupts fundamentally. Even for liberals.
Our job is to remove today's corrupt ruling class from the citadel, and to do that we need to discredit liberal power. Let's get started right now.

Nanny staters find a new cause on the 'inequality' front

Thomas Lifson

Here comes another excuse for the government to take over child-rearing responsibilities from parents. All in the name of the best of intentions. NPR (who else?) reports on the "word gap":

In the early 1990s, a team of researchers decided to follow about 40 volunteer families - some poor, some middle class, some rich - during the first three years of their new children's lives. Every month, the researchers recorded an hour of sound from the families' homes. Later in the lab, the team listened back and painstakingly tallied up the total number of words spoken in each household.
What they found came to be known as the "word gap."
It turned out, by the age of 3, children born into low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

Now that's a real shocker. It turns out that "rich" people tend to be better parents than "low income" people. They are smarter, have better vocabularies, and take great care to enrich the environment in which their children grow up. That's why their kids do better in school, have a better work ethic, and in turn become "richer" than kids with negligent parents who park their kids in front of the boob tube while they party.

When I was getting my doctorate in Sociology, I first heard the field defined as "the painful and tedious explication of the obvious in impenetrable jargon." That certainly rings true in this case.

Let me add some caveats. The real gap is not between rich and poor, but between smart and caring, and stupid and indolent. The former qualities tend to produce wealth and the latter tend to produce poverty. Not always, in part because some people voluntarily choose satisfying but remunerative occupations, while others just get lucky and find themselves wealthy without much effort or talent. But there is enough of a correlation for the decriers of inequality to find a new cause to champion.

The obviuous lesson to be drawn here is to shame people who are negligent parents into changing their ways, and to discourage such people from having children in the first place. By not, for instance, subsidizing them. But that is not the lesson that will be drawn. Instead, you can count on these "findings" serving as an excuse for state intervention into child-rearing. Count on it.

And if you think bureaucrats will do a better job of enriching vocabularies than loving parents, you have a future in progressive politics.
Hat tip: Hot Air

The Evolution of Class Warfare in America

By Richard Winchester

Some people believe that when Marx and Engels began The Communist Manifesto (1848) with "[t]he history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles," they were the first to call attention to the importance of class conflict in politics.

That is wrong. Class struggles occurred throughout ancient, medieval, and modern European history, and authors like Thomas Jefferson, David Ricardo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to name just three who ante-date The Communist Manifesto, wrote about them (in 1787, 1817, and 1840, respectively).

Class conflict -- albeit historically more muted -- has also been a feature of American politics. Indeed, one of the most succinct statements of the economic -- i.e., class -- basis of politics can be found in James Madison's The Federalist #10 (11/22/1787). Writing about the origins of "factions" -- which are akin to political parties -- Madison wrote that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. ... The regulation of these ... interests forms the principal task of modern legislation[.]"

Partisan differences between social classes have been a feature of American electoral politics since at least the 1930s, when FDR's "New Deal Coalition" -- which was made up partly by people from the lower social orders -- faced off against the wealthy and upper-middle classes, many of whom backed the GOP. FDR's coalition began to come apart in the late 1940s and early 1950s but was mostly resurrected in the 1964 election. By the time George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004, the New Deal coalition was gone.

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012, however, were marked by class conflict's resurgence. Harking back to FDR, who may have been his inspiration, Obama's appeals to class warfare are more blatant than those of most Democrats who ran for the presidency, from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One also sees differences in how working-class individuals respond to appeals to class warfare by comparing blue-collar workers' opinions about inequality in the late 1950s with those of many persons from the lower classes today.

To anticipate the argument, many contemporary Democrats, especially the Obamians, are much more transparent in using class warfare to advance their agenda than were their partisan forebears (other than FDR and, perhaps, Truman). Sadly, appeals to class warfare fall on more receptive ears than would have been the case 50 or 60 years ago.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's penchant for appealing to class warfare to buttress his "New Deal" policies is well-known. Whether calling for higher income tax rates on the well-to-do or attacking "economic royalists," Roosevelt frequently used the bully pulpit to heighten class antagonisms.

Revisionists, such as Amity Shlaes, explain that, although aimed at the downtrodden "forgotten man," New Deal policies actually hindered the economic recovery that could have benefited the lower social orders. Sadly, however, FDR's frequent appeals to class warfare worked, in no small part, because key Republicans elites seemed oblivious of the fact that the Great Depression undermined the laissez-faire notions that GOP presidents from William McKinley to Calvin Coolidge had used successfully.

Perhaps FDR's most important legacy was to enshrine the notion that the central government, and most especially the president, was the key player in the nation's economic well-being. (One can trace that idea back to the Progressive tradition, which saw its first successes in Theodore Roosevelt's, and especially Woodrow Wilson's, administrations.) FDR's legacy was codified by the Employment Act of 1946.

By the end of the 1970s, however, FDR's legacy had turned to ashes, as it become more and more obvious that, as Ronald Reagan put it in his first Inaugural Address, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Not many years later, Bill Clinton would say, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, "[t[he era of big government is over."

Unhappily, Clinton was mistaken. Barack Obama's election in 2008 was accompanied by his promise to "fundamentally transform" the United States by creating a European-style welfare state, with big government controlling over half the nation's Gross Domestic Product. More than any president since FDR, Obama has made explicit appeals to class warfare to advance his agenda. His calls for raising income taxes on the well-to-do -- defined variously as those making over $250,000 or $200,000 per year or whatever -- are too numerous to cite.

As his poll numbers have plummeted recently, Obama's appeals to class warfare have become even more blatant -- and some would also say more petulant. On December 4, 2013, for example, he declared that this generation's "defining challenge" is the growing income inequality between America's richest one percent and the rest of society.

There are multiple challenges to Obama's assertion. Blogs for The American Thinker by Henry Percy and Rick Moran illustrate why the left's obsession with "income inequality" is misplaced. Moran cites an op-ed by Robert Grady in The Wall Street Journal (12/22/13) that asserts that the focus on "income inequality" overlooks other, perhaps even more significant, features of wealth that alter America's portrait. Grady also cites a 2012 article in Policy Review by Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian that further details the weaknesses of the left's "income inequality" mania.

If bloviating about "income inequality" by Obama, other left-wing Democrats, and denizens of the mainstream media -- which almost invariably means the same thing -- is misplaced, then why does it work?

Alas, the answer to that query tells us more about significant segments of today's public than it does about those bloviating about "income inequality."

Some Americans have always been jealous because others made more money or lived a tonier lifestyle. Figures in American history -- read, for example, Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) -- and in fiction, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway -- are driven by envy, or at least by ambivalence about others' -- Jay Gatsby's -- wealth.

Appeals to working-class envy of the rich, however, have not always fallen on receptive ears. In 1959, Robert Lane published "The Fear of Equality" in The American Sociological Review. That article was based on Lane's in-depth interviews with working-class men in "Eastport" (New Haven), CT. The gist of Lane's piece is that many of these men found the very notion of equality unsettling. Rather than being consumed by envy, most wanted to get ahead by dint of their own efforts. They would have found calls for class warfare offensive.

There seems to have been a significant change in the character of many Americans from the lower social classes. Motivated, perhaps, by the explosion of entitlement programs since 1960, at least if Nicholas Eberstadt is correct, a not-so-subtle change in the American character has left sizable portions of people from the lower social orders driven by greed and envy.

These people have learned that being on the government dole, at the expense of those wealthier than they, is no longer a source of embarrassment.

If that is true, it little wonder that Obama and other leftists wage class warfare.

President Obama's Top 10 Constitutional Violations Of 2013

By Ilya Shapiro
One of Barack Obama’s chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse.
Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up the constitutional aspects of his policy agenda, but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. And he’s been most frustrated with the separation of powers, which doesn’t allow him to “fundamentally transform” the country without congressional acquiescence.
But that hasn’t stopped him. In its first term, the Administration launched a “We Can’t Wait” initiative, with senior aide Dan Pfeiffer explaining that “when Congress won’t act, this president will.” And earlier this year, President Obama said in announcing his new economic plans that “I will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way.”
And so, as we reach the end of another year of political strife that’s fundamentally based on clashing views on the role of government in society, I thought I’d update a list I made two years ago and hereby present President Obama’s top 10 constitutional violations of 2013.
1. Delay of Obamacare’s out-of-pocket caps. The Labor Department announced in February that it was delaying for a year the part of the healthcare law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance. This may have been sensible—insurers and employers need time to comply with rapidly changing regulations—but changing the law requires actual legislation.
2. Delay of Obamacare’s employer mandate. The administration announced via blogpost on the eve of the July 4 holiday that it was delaying the requirement that employers of at least 50 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine. This time it did cite statutory authority, but the cited provisions allow the delay of certain reporting requirements, not of the mandate itself.
3. Delay of Obamacare’s insurance requirements. The famous pledge that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” backfired when insurance companies started cancelling millions of plans that didn’t comply with Obamacare’s requirements. President Obama called a press conference last month to proclaim that people could continue buying non-complying plans in 2014—despite Obamacare’s explicit language to the contrary. He then refused to consider a House-passed bill that would’ve made this action legal.
4. Exemption of Congress from Obamacare. A little-known part of Obamacare requires Congressmen and their staff to get insurance through the new healthcare exchanges, rather than a taxpayer-funded program. In the quiet of August, President Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management to interpret the law to maintain the generous congressional benefits.
5. Expansion of the employer mandate penalty through IRS regulation. Obamacare grants tax credits to people whose employers don’t provide coverage if they buy a plan “through an Exchange established by the State”—and then fines employers for each employee receiving such a subsidy. No tax credits are authorized for residents of states where the exchanges are established by the federal government, as an incentive for states to create exchanges themselves. Because so few (16) states did, however, the IRS issued a rule ignoring that plain text and allowed subsidies (and commensurate fines) for plans coming from “a State Exchange, regional Exchange, subsidiary Exchange, and federally-facilitated Exchange.”
6. Political profiling by the IRS. After seeing a rise in the number of applications for tax-exempt status, the IRS in 2010 compiled a “be on the lookout” (“BOLO”) list to identify organizations engaged in political activities. The list included words such as “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” and “Israel”; subjects such as government spending, debt, or taxes; and activities such as criticizing the government, educating about the Constitution, or challenging Obamacare. The targeting continued through May of this year.
7. Outlandish Supreme Court arguments. Between January 2012 and June 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Justice Department’s extreme positions 9 times. The cases ranged from criminal procedure to property rights, religious liberty to immigration, securities regulation to tax law. They had nothing in common other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually unlimited. As a comparison, in the entire Bush and Clinton presidencies, the government suffered 15 and 23 unanimous rulings, respectively.
8. Recess appointments. Last year, President Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, during what he considered to be a Senate recess. But the Senate was still holding “pro forma” sessions every three days—a technique developed by Sen. Harry Reid to thwart Bush recess appointments. (Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, provides that authority remains with the Treasury Secretary until a director is “confirmed by the Senate.”) In January, the D.C. Circuit held the NLRB appointments to be unconstitutional, which ruling White House spokesman Jay Carney said only applied to “one court, one case, one company.”
9. Assault on free speech and due process on college campuses. Responding to complaints about the University of Montana’s handling of sexual assault claims, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, in conjunction with the Justice Department, sent the university a letter intended as a national “blueprint” for tackling sexual harassment. The letter urges a crackdown on “unwelcome” speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere “more likely than not” standard.

10. Mini-DREAM Act. Congress has shamelessly failed to pass any sort of immigration reform, including for the most sympathetic victims of the current non-system, young people who were brought into the country illegally as children. Nonetheless, President Obama, contradicting his own previous statements claiming to lack authority, directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work and residence permits to the so-called Dreamers. The executive branch undoubtedly has discretion regarding enforcement priorities, but granting de facto green cards goes beyond a decision to defer deportation in certain cases.
It was hard to limit myself to 10 items, of course—Obamacare alone could’ve filled many such lists—but these, in my judgment, represent the chief executive’s biggest dereliction this year of his duty to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, and to “take care that the law be faithfully executed.”
Alas, things may get worse before they get better. New presidential “counselor” John Podesta’s belief in governance by fiat is no secret; in a 2010 report, he wrote that focusing on executive power “presents a real opportunity for the Obama administration to turn its focus away from a divided Congress and the unappetizing process of making legislative sausage.”
Happy New Year!
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.

EPA Pushes Gun Control Through Green Ammo Mandate

Investor's Business Daily Editorials

Gun Control: Thanks to government regulations, the closing of the last U.S. lead smelter and a push for "green" lead-free ammunition, ammo prices will skyrocket. Does the Second Amendment threaten the environment?
Having been stymied by court defeats such as the Supreme Court's deciding that the Second Amendment does indeed confer a right to keep and bear arms on individuals throughout the United States, advocates of a gun-free America and a disarmed citizenry are taking a different approach: Go after the ammunition through regulations that stifle domestic production and force the use of more expensive and eco-friendly substitutes.
Expanded regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency have forced the closing as of Dec. 31 of the country's last bullet-producing lead smelter — a facility operated by Doe Run Co. in Herculaneum, Mo., that first opened its doors in 1892. As a result of the closure, a company press release notes, 145 Doe Run employees and some 73 contractors will lose their jobs.
The Herculaneum smelter, according to the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action, is the only one in the U.S. that can produce lead bullion from raw lead ore and the components for traditional lead ammunition.
The only alternatives, the institute says, will be to import the ammo components or use EPA-approved "green" ammunition.
The Arms Trade Treaty may be unratified, but it provides the administration with a justification for restricting U.S. imports of ammunition and components.
While there are a number of secondary lead smelters that recycle lead from various sources such as car batteries, the net effect is that prices will climb high enough, the administration hopes, to curtail gun purchases and use.
The EPA in 2008 issued new National Ambient Air Quality Standards for lead that were 10 times tighter than the previous standard. The Doe Run Co. tried to bring the Herculaneum smelter into compliance but in 2010 realized the cost would be prohibitive.
It reached an agreement with the state of Missouri and the EPA to shut down the facility.
The Pentagon has announced plans to phase out lead ammunition by 2018, and so-called "green bullets" have been under testing since 2010. The Army has already switched to what it calls a greener 5.56-millimeter "enhanced performance round."
This undoubtedly will increase procurement costs. It's doubtful our enemies will be so environmentally conscious. Besides, war itself is not good for the environment, so we doubt green bullets will help all that much.
Some two dozen states, including green California, already ban lead ammunition.
"Switching to nontoxic lead ammunition will save the lives of eagles, condors and thousands of other birds every year — and, importantly, will keep hunters and their families from being exposed to toxic lead," the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a phaseout of lead bullets for hunting by July 2019.
Like the federal government, the center has no problem with wind turbines slicing and dicing bald eagles and an assortment of endangered species.
Critics of lead ammunition have warned of lead finding its way into the water supply and food chain.
And people who handle ammunition, they claim, have been found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. Of course, victims shot by armed criminals have elevated, often-fatal levels of lead in their bodies as well.
Just as the EPA and the Obama administration have tried to kill off coal use through regulations that make its use prohibitively expensive, forcing mines and power plants to close, the administration is hoping to further its gun-control aims by making gun owners use more expensive, green bullets.

Chamber of Commerce Promises $50 Million in Fight Against Tea Party

By: Cathy Burke
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is ready to take on the tea party in 2014 Senate primaries and elections with a deep-pocketed boost of establishment and business Republican candidates.

"Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates," Chamber strategist Scott Reed told The Wall Street Journal. "That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket."

 The financial support, which The Hill reported would pour at least $50 million into the campaigns of centrist GOP candidates, is part of an aggressive approach toward tea party Republicans since the 16-day October government shutdown.

The Chamber has expressed its displeasure with tea party favorites Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who resisted passing a budget without a provision to defund Obamacare, triggering a stalemate.

Just a month later, the Chamber jumped into the intra-party GOP voting, backing establishment GOP candidate Bradley Byrne over tea party prospect Dean Young in an Alabama special House election.

Byrne beat Young, and went on to an easy victory in the Dec. 17 special election, defeating Democrat Burton LeFlore.

The Chamber — which hasn't usually gotten involved in GOP primaries — is airing ads for Rep. Mike Simpson in Idaho, where he faces a tea party-backed challenger in his race for a ninth House term.

Hard-right candidates' blunders are perceived to have cost the GOP five Senate seats in recent years, The Hill reported.

Republicans, for example, lost Senate elections in Indiana and Missouri after conservative candidates made controversial comments about abortion and rape that hurt their support, particularly among women.

The Chamber could also toss its influence into upcoming Senate races in Georgia,
Iowa, and North Carolina, where tea party candidates are challenging, The Hill reported.

Meanwhile, the head of Heritage Action is vowing to challenge GOP leaders on a number of fiscal issues — and to keep active with grassroots activists.

"Lawmakers do not have a monopoly on information, and we will continue to communicate directly with their constituents on important legislation as it moves through Congress," Michael Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation think tank, told the Journal.

He said most lawmakers "will find it difficult to go back home and defend votes that increase spending, increase deficits and undermine the rule of law."

General calls for massive march on Washington: 'We need to get off our derrieres. ... Hope is not a strategy'

by Bob Unruh


The retired American military commander who earlier said in a statement released to WND that Americans need to confront Barack Obama’s tyranny now is recommending the Egyptian model through which to do that.
The Egyptian model, Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely explained on a podcast of an Internet radio show, was that 33 million people stood up to their government and told officials no.

The result was that the Egyptian Muslim Brother was removed from power and then-President Mohammed Morsi was removed from office, Vallely explained,
His call for a massive march on Washington came recently on the WBTM (We Become The Media) show.
He was asked whether America can be restored as the shining light on the hill for freedom when the electoral process, which resulted in two presidencies for Obama in 2008 and 2012, “are known to be corrupt.”
Vallely said the absence of leadership in the White House and Congress makes it difficult, and he said, “I’m not even sure our traditional process will straighten our government out in time to save us.”
And he said processes like impeachment simply won’t happen.
Then he suggested the Egyptian model, and he said millions of Americans need to “stand up” to Washington “within the next 12 months.”
He said doing nothing is not an option, because Washington won’t fix itself and “hope is not a strategy.”
“We need something … a no confidence vote,” he suggested. And perhaps legislation that could create a national recall process.
“We need to get off our derrieres, march at the state capitol, march in Washington,” he said. “Make citizens arrests.”
He said when there are those who are “conducting treason … violating the Constitution, violating our laws,” it should not be overlooked.
“When you have a president and his team who don’t care about the Constitution, they will do anything they can to win,” he said.
Vallely has been immensely popular among tea party organizations that are seeking a way to restore the rule of law to Washington.
Among other things, they cite the Obamacare law, and the 15 or more times Obama has changed the law – without consulting Congress.
In a statement earlier to WND, Vallely said a vote of no confidence could be used.
The founder of Stand Up America, an organization that provides education resources for leaders and activists based on the values of the Founding Fathers, said:
“Clearly America has lost confidence and no longer trusts those in power at a most critical time in our history,” Vallely said. “It is true that not all who ply the halls of power fit under that broad brush, but most of them are guilty of many egregious acts and we say it is time to hold a vote of no confidence. It’s time for a ‘recall.’”
Vallely believes the “credibility of our current leadership is gone.”
Now, he said, “we listen to their excuses, finger-pointing, lies and all manner of chicanery.”
He admitted there is no legal authority in a vote of no confidence, but he argued it will “take back the power of discourse.”
“What else is our nation to do now that the ‘rule-of-law’ has effectively been thrown out the window by the Obama administration? How are we to trust our government anymore, now that lying and fraud are acceptable practices?” he asked.
Vallely believes impeachment likely wouldn’t lead to conviction and doesn’t solve the problem, anyway.
“Harry Reid still controls the Senate, so like in Clinton’s day, forget about a finding of guilty,” he wrote. “Incidentally, if Obama was found guilty and removed from office, Joe Biden would step in, Valerie Jarrett still wields all the power, and likely we get more of the same.”

The Constitution can be amended without going through Congress, he pointed out, but it would take too much time, “a luxury we just do not have it we are going to save our republic.”
Sign the petition urging Congress to pursue impeachment right away!
“That brings us to the other word no one wants to utter, revolution. In our opinion, this is the least palatable option. … Others talk about the military taking over as we saw in Egypt; again, we do not support this route,” he said.
Vallely listed a sampling of Obama’s broken promises and lies, crediting Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine:

• His promise not to allow lobbyists to work in his administration. (They have.)
• His commitment to slash earmarks. (He didn’t.)
• To be the most transparent presidency in history. (He’s not.)
• To put an end to “phony accounting.” (It started almost on Day 1 and continues.)
• And to restore trust in government. (Trust in government is at near-historic lows.)
• His pledge to seek public financing in the general election. (He didn’t.)
• To treat super-PACS as a “threat to democracy.” (He embraced them.)
• His pledge to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent. (It remained above 8 percent for the longest stretch since the Great Depression.)
• To create five million new energy jobs alone. (The total number of jobs created in Obama’s first term was roughly one-tenth that figure.)
• To identify all those “shovel-ready’ jobs. (Mr. Obama later chuckled that his much-hyped “shovel-ready projects” were “not as shovel-ready as we expected.”)
• To lift two million Americans from poverty. (A record 46 million Americans are living in poverty during the Obama era.)
• His promise to bring down health care premiums by $2,500 for the typical family (they went up) … allow Americans to keep the health care coverage they currently have (many can’t) … refuse to fund abortion via the Affordable Care Act (it did) … to respect religious liberties (he has violated them) … and the insistent that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was not a tax (it is).
• Obama’s pledge to stop the rise of oceans. (It hasn’t.)
• To “remake the world” and to “heal the planet.” (Hardly.)
• To usher in a “new beginning” based on “mutual respect” with the Arab and Islamic world and “help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.” (Come again?)
• To punish Syria if it crossed the “red line” of using chemical weapons. (The “red line” was crossed earlier this year – and nothing of consequence happened.)
• That as president “I don’t bluff.” (See the previous sentence on Syria.)
• And of course the much-ballyhooed Russian reset. (Tensions between Russia and the United States are increasing and examples of Russia undermining U.S. interests are multiplying.)
• And let’s not forget Mr. Obama’s promise to bring us together. (He is the most polarizing president in the history of the Gallup polling.)
• Or his assurance to us that he would put an end to the type of politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” (All three have increased during the Obama presidency.)
• And his counsel to us to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.” (Remind me again whose campaign allies accused Mitt Romney of being responsible for the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.)

“It is time to recall the reprobates and reclaim the power of the people,” Vallely said. “We need to start with the White House and all of Obama’s appointees, especially Eric Holder. … Then on to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi – the architects who shoved Obamacare down our throats. We also cannot forget John Boehner and company who openly castigate the tea-party caucus which are only doing that which they campaigned upon.”

Read the definitive case for removing Barack Obama from office in “Impeachable Offenses” by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott.
Vallely quoted commentator Andrew C. McCarthy, who said that “absent the political will to remove the president, he will remain president no matter how many high crimes and misdemeanors he stacks up. … and absent the removal of the president, the United States will be fundamentally transformed.”
Vallely noted that while the U.S. Constitution lacks a provision for a “recall” at the federal level, “there is nothing to prevent its use as a comprehensive de facto indictment and conviction for contempt of Congress, violations of oath of office and of the Constitution itself – for all the reasons stated in such a resolution.”
He warned of growing “tyrannical centralized rule” without action.
There may be advances in the 2014 elections, but will that be a solution?
“Obama is still the president, and his Cabinet and appointees still remain in power. … Obama will just continue to subvert the Constitution he took an oath to faithfully protect. His track record shows us that no matter what the make-up of Congress is, he will twist his way around it with a pen and secure even more power reminiscent of a dictator,” Vallely said.
“When that does not work, he will manipulate the courts and law enforcement will be run by fiat, choosing winners and losers.”
Congress already is addressing charges that Obama is violating the Constitution.
WND reported when Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said Obama’s actions have reached “an unprecedented level, and we’ve got to do something about it.
“Assume that a statute said you had to provide two forms of ID to vote. Can the president require three forms? Can the president require one form? Can you suspend all requirements? If not, why not?” he said. “If you can turn off certain categories of law, do you not also have the power to turn off all categories of law?”
Gowdy cited Obama’s decisions to ignore certain immigration laws, even though Congress did not approve the changes. He also cited arbitrary changes to the Obamacare law and Obama’s “recess appointments” of judges even though the U.S. Senate was not in recess.
His proposal is for Congress to take the White House to court over the president’s actions, through a resolution proposed by Rep. Tom Rice, R-Ga., that would authorize the House to sue the Obama administration. It has 30 co-sponsors.
Rice said that because of “this disregard of our country’s checks and balances, many of you have asked me to bring legal action against the president.”
“After carefully researching the standing the House of Representatives has and what action we can take, I have introduced a resolution to stop the president’s clear overreach,” he said.
A Fox News interviewer asked Gowdy if Obama could refuse to enforce election laws.
“Why not?” asked Gowdy, “If you can turn off immigration laws, if you can turn off the mandatory minimum in our drug statutes, if you can turn off the so-called Affordable Care Act – why not election laws?”
Gowdy noted that a liberal law professor, Jonathan Turley, agrees.
WND reported Turley’s concerns earlier this month.
Turley has represented members of Congress in a lawsuit over the Libyan war, represented workers at the secret Area 51 military base and served as counsel on national security cases. He now says Obama is a danger to the U.S. Constitution.
He was addressing a House Judiciary Committee hearing Dec. 4. Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asked him: “Professor Turley, the Constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It’s about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president’s unilateral modification of act[s] of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?”
Turley replied: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he’s not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He’s becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power.”
Turley explained that the “Newtonian orbit that the three branches exist in is a delicate one but it is designed to prevent this type of concentration.”
“There are two trends going on which should be of equal concern to all members of Congress,” he said. “One is that we have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority. And with that trend we also have the continued rise of this fourth branch. We have agencies that are quite large that issue regulations. The Supreme Court said recently that agencies could actually define their own or interpret their own jurisdiction.”
Turley was appointed in 1998 to the prestigious Shapiro Chair for Public Interest at Georgetown. He has handled a wide range of precedent-setting and headline-making cases, including the successful defense of Petty Officer Daniel King, who faced the death penalty for alleged spying for Russia.
Turley also has served as the legal expert in the review of polygamy laws in the British Columbia Supreme Court. He’s been a consultant on homeland security, and his articles appear regularly in national publications such as the New York Times and USA Today.
WND reported that it was at the same hearing that Michael Cannon, director of Health Policy Studies for the Cato Institute, said there is “one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restraints that the Constitution places of the government.”
“Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it,” he said.
“That is certainly something that no one wants to contemplate. If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws, then they will conclude that neither are they.”
Cannon said it is “very dangerous” for the president to “wantonly ignore the laws, to try to impose obligations upon people that the legislature did not approve.”
Several members of Congress also contributed their opinions in an interview with talk-show host Sean Hannity.
See the Hannity segment:
Vallely explained that a “no confidence” vote now “would also tell the world that we recognize the mess this administration has wrought upon the world and we do not support his actions. Despite what supporters of Obama say about our standing in the world, the world is laughing at us. We are not pleased!”
Without that action, he writes, “Obama will just continue to subvert the Constitution he took an oath to faithfully protect.”

The Only Leverage We Have Is Extreme Frugality

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Debt is serfdom, capital in all its forms is freedom. The only leverage available to all is extreme frugality in service of accumulating productive capital.

There are only three ways to better oneself financially: marry someone with money, inherit money or accumulate capital/savings and invest it in productive assets. (We'll leave out lobbying the Federal government for a fat contract, faking disability, selling derivatives designed to default and other criminal activities.)

The only way to accumulate capital to invest is to spend considerably less than you earn. For a variety of reasons, humans seem predisposed to spend more as their income rises. Thus the person making $30,000 a year imagines that if only they could earn $100,000 a year, they could save half of their net income. Yet when that happy day arrives, they generally find their expenses have risen in tandem with their income, and the anticipated ease of saving large chunks of money never materializes.

What qualifies as extreme frugality? Saving a third of one's net income is a good start, though putting aside half of one's net income is even better.

The lower one's income, the more creative one has to be to save a significant percentage of one's net income. On the plus side, the income tax burden for lower-income workers is low, so relatively little of gross income is lost to taxes.

The second half of the job is investing the accumulated capital in productive assets and/or enterprises. The root of capitalism is capital, and that includes not just financial capital (cash) but social capital (the value of one's networks and associations) and human capital (one's skills and experience and ability to master new knowledge and skills).

Cash invested in tools and new skills and collaborative networks can leverage a relatively modest sum of cash capital into a significant income stream, something that cannot be said of financial investments in a zero-interest rate world.

We hear a lot about the rising cost of college and the impossibility of getting a degree without loans or tens of thousands of dollars contributed by parents. I think my own experience is instructive, as there is another path: extreme frugality.

At 19, my two sets of parents were unable to provide me with more than a rust-bucket old car. My father sent me an airline ticket to visit him, but nobody ponied up any cash for tuition, books, or living expenses.


Step One was eliminating housing costs until I earned enough to pay rent. By good fortune, I was able to secure a work-trade housing situation: I was given a room filled with boxes of accounting records, and a path through the boxes to a bathroom and tiny kitchenette in trade for yard work.

Step Two: cut all other expenses to the bone. Since I was working for a remodeling contractor, I needed the car to get to the various jobsites, but I bicycled whenever possible to save on gasoline. I prepared all my own meals and avoided buying snacks, drinks, etc. until my income rose enough to swing such luxuries. I can count the number of drinks or meals I bought on campus in four years on one hand.

Music purchased: none. (We played our own music or listened to the radio on the jobsite.) Clothes purchased new: none. (That's what church jumble sales/bazaars are for: $1 shirts, etc.) And so on.

Step Three: find a job with upside earnings and skills. I'd worked in snack bars and mowed lawns, but construction opened up opportunities to advance my skills and gain sufficient proficiency to deserve a raise in pay.

Since I wasn't guaranteed any opportunity for advancement, I volunteered to work Saturdays for my bosses or anyone else on the crew who had sidework on the weekends. I volunteered my construction services to community groups to gain experience (there's nothing like being responsible for the project, as opposed to just following orders) and open access to new networks of productive, accomplished people.

For example, I rebuilt the rotted redwood rear steps to the historic Agee House in the back of Manoa Valley for free. (Sadly, this wonderful building burned down a few years later.)

In business, the word "hustle" has the negative connotation of high pressure sales or a scam. In sports, it has a positive connotation of devoting more energy and effort as a means of compensating for lower skills or physical size. Step Three requires hustle: when you don't have any advantages of capital, connections or skills, you have to acquire those by hustle and initiative.

Step Four: apply for obscure, small-sum scholarships. $500 may not sound like a lot, but it means competition will be lower and if you get it, that's $500 you don't have to earn. As you build your networks in the community, put the word out you're looking for small scholarships for next semester's tuition. In general, people tend to respond more positively to helping you with a specific goal rather than an open-ended or undefined goal such as "I need money for college."

Step Five: work productively and ambitiously, i.e. work a lot but work smart. It never occurred to me that working 25+ hours a week and taking a full load of classes (4-5 classes and 15+ credits a semester) was something to bemoan--I was having a great time, and earned a 3.5 grade point average and my B.A. in four years.

60-hour work weeks should be considered the minimum effort necessary--but only if those hours are 100% productive work, not hours interrupted with games, phone calls, goofing off, etc. Those 60 hours are flat-out, power-out-the-work hours, not hours diluted by half-effort, distractions, etc.

Step Six: learn to do things yourself that cost money, such as maintaining your car. It's not that hard to change the oil and other basics of maintenance.

If you push yourself and maintain a disciplined life, huge amounts of work can be ground through in a few hours. This is as true of digging a ditch as it is of plowing through texts and writing papers.

Tuition at the state university I attended (the University of Hawaii at Manoa) has risen enormously in the decades since I worked my way through college (roughly $9,000 a year now), but it's still possible to work one's way through if the student pursues all six steps assiduously and with perseverance and hustle and secures full-time work in summers.

One reason I did not bemoan working long hours and practicing extreme frugality was that this was still the default setting in a few dwindling enclaves of our culture and economy. The idea that you could borrow money for everything you wanted had not yet conquered the culture and economy: thrift in service of big goals was still a cultural norm.

In other words, what I did wasn't heroic or unusual; it was the norm.

I should mention that my university years overlapped with the deepest recession (at that time) since the Great Depression: 1973-74. Work was hard to come by, gasoline skyrocketed in price, and inflation started to outpace wages, especially in the low-wage jobs typically available to college students.

It was not a cakewalk by any means.

The upside of relentlessly pursuing Steps One - Six is tremendous: personal integrity, financial independence, and the other powerful freedoms that accrue to these foundations. Measured by income and things I owned, I was "poor." But measured by independence and by skills and networks gained, I was wealthy in many important ways.

Extreme frugality enabled me to not just finish college in four years but to buy a (cheap) parcel of land while still a student with cash and have a substantial savings account by graduation day.

I don't look back on those years of voluntary deprivation in service of independence, freedom, knowledge, and social and human capital as "poor me:" I see them as the extremely positive, productive template that I have followed in the decades since. I never did marry or inherit money, and so whatever I have now is the direct result of extreme frugality in service of integrity, independence and the accrual of capital that can be productively invested.

The only leverage available to all is extreme frugality in service of accumulating savings that can be productively invested in building human, social and financial capital.

Debt is serfdom, capital in all its forms is freedom.

100 Years Ago: Why Bankers Created the Fed

December 23, 2013 by Christopher Westley

The Democratic Party gained prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century as being the party that opposed the Second Bank of the United States. In the process, it tapped into an anti-state sentiment that proved so strong that we wouldn't see another like it until the next century.
Its adversaries were Whig politicians who defended the bank and its ability to grow the government and their own personal fortunes at the same time. They were, in fact, quite open about these arrangements. It was considered standard-operating procedure for Whig representatives to receive monetary compensation for their support of the Bank when leaving Congress. The Whig Daniel Webster even expected annual payments while in Congress. Once he complained to the Bank of the United States President Nicholas Biddle, “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me my usual retainer.”
No wonder these people were often pummeled with canes on the House floor.

It is little wonder that early Democrats garnered such popular support and would demand Andrew Jackson end America’s experiment with central banking. Jackson called it “dangerous to the liberty of the American people because it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control.”

It’s hard to believe that guy who said that is now on the $20 bill.
Jacksonalso warnedthat the Bank of the United States was “a vast electioneering engine” that could “control the Government and change its character.” These sentiments were echoed by Roger Taney, Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, who talked of the Bank's “corrupting influence” and ability to “influence elections.” (The Whigs would later get revenge on this future chief justice when Abraham Lincoln, in response to a written opinion with which he disagreed, issued his arrest warrant.)
But the courtship between the political classes and their cronies would continue in the decades following Lincoln’s assassination. Those politically well-connected groups that benefited from early central banking continued to benefit from government finance, especially off of “internal improvements,”which is the nineteenth-century term for pork. National banking would appear during the War Between the States, setting in place a banking system in which individual banks would be chartered by the federal government. The government itself would use regulations backed by a new armed U.S. Treasury police force to encourage the banks’ inflation and protect them from the market penalties that inflation would otherwise bring them, such as the loss of specie and the occurrence of bank runs.
The boom and bust cycle, explained by the Austrian School in such detail, became worse and worse in the period leading up to 1913. And with the rise of Progressive Era spending on war and welfare, and with the pressure on banks to inflate to finance this activity, the boom and bust cycles worsened even more. If there was one saving grace about this period it would be that banks were forced to internalize their losses. When banks faced runs on their currencies, private financiers would bail them out. But this arrangement didn’t last, so when the losses grew, those financiers would secretly organize to reintroduce central banking to America, thus engineering an urgent need for a new “lender of last resort.” The result was the Federal Reserve.
This was the implicit socialization of the banking industry in the United States. People called the Federal Reserve Act the Currency Bill, because it was to create a bureaucracy that would assume the currency-creating duties of member banks.
It was like the Patriot Act, in that both were centralizing bills that were written years in advance by people who were waiting for the appropriate political environment in which to introduce them. It was like our current health care bills, in which cartelized firms in private industry wrote chunks of the legislation behind closed doors long before they were introduced in Congress.
It was unnecessary. If banks were simply held to similar standards as other more efficient industries were held to — the rule of law at the very least — then far fewer fraudulent banks would ever come about. There were market institutions that would penalize those banks that over-issued currencies, brought about bank runs, and financial crises. As Mises would later write:

What is needed to prevent further credit expansion is to place the banking business under the general rules of commercial and civil laws compelling each individual and firm to fulfill all obligations in full compliance with the terms of contract.

The bill was passed fairly easily, in part because the Democrats had a larger majority in both Houses than they do today. There were significant differences that were resolved in conference, with one compromise resulting in the requirement that only 40 percent of the gold reserve back the new currency. So instead of a 1-to-1 relationship between gold and currency issued — a ratio that defined sound market banking since the time of Renaissance Italy — the new Federal Reserve notes would be inflated, by law, at a ratio of 1-to-2.5.
The bill that was first drawn up at Jekyll Island was signed by Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office shortly after the Senate approved it. At one point during the signing ceremony, as he reached for a gold pen to finish signing the bill, he jokingly declared “I’m drawing on the gold reserve.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Central banks always result in feeding those forces that centralize and expand the nation-state. The Fed’s policies in the 1920s, so well documented by Rothbard, would provoke the Great Depression, which, in the end, wrenched political power from cities and state governments to the swampland in Washington. Today people take seriously the claim that there can be a viable federal solution to every problem thanks to the money printed up by the Fed, while each decade has seen a larger proportion of the population become dependent on its inflation.
And yet Andrew Jackson’s beliefs about the perniciousness of the Second Bank of the United States are just as applicable to the Federal Reserve today.
Here’s to hoping we’ll see Jackson’s hawkish nose and unkempt hair on a gold-backed, privately issued currency in the not–too-distant future.

Environmentalism Is the New Racism

By Daniel Greenfield

At the heart of all the left’s political agendas is wealth redistribution. That is as true of the Global Warming eco-scam as it is of anything else.
The left knows that idealism is a puny force compared to the power of profit. It may employ the slogans of idealism, recruiting college students to wave signs, dress up as polar bears and cry Armageddon; but it uses the appeal of cold hard cash to invest as many people as it can into its cause.
Wealth redistribution gave the left a firm grip on power in America. No matter how many lies it tells or how many crimes it commits, it knows that when election time comes around those who profit from its wealth redistribution programs will flock to the polls; caring about nothing but their own bottom line.
The Global Warming scheme began the same way with tiers of economic interest.
The first tier came out of the expert elites; scientists who had grant money waved under their noses and environmentalists who went from waving signs outside corporate offices to working as consultants for those corporations. Publicizing the scam were the journalists and politicians who reinvented themselves as environmental crusaders pumping out books warning that the end of the world was near.
Soon an entire expert class was profitably employed predicting doomsday and teaching corporations to Greenwash their products. These were the Green versions of the leftist sociologists who had predicted race wars if economic inequity went on and the radical Black activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who had monetized their instant racism into sensitivity consulting firms and national organizations.
The second tier came from the bankers and corporations looking to profit from the crony capitalist sphere known as the Carbon Economy by selling other companies the power to impose costs on their rivals and customers through environmental regulations.
An entire fictional economy sprang up with artificial shortages and imaginary products and services sold. Artificial shortages were used to limit carbon emissions requiring the purchase of credits. Environmental regulations made carbon into a currency using the threat of catastrophe and the promise of profit.
Once again, Green followed Black. J.P. Morgan had received hundreds of millions in state payments from its food stamp card empire. Herbert and Marion Sandler made billions from subprime mortgages and Google is cashing in on housing project tax credit funds managed by a financial services company heavily invested in by Warren Buffett.
The dirty little secret of the welfare state is that most of the money doesn’t go to the minorities on whose behalf it operates; but to the big banks and liberal billionaires who keep the wealth redistribution going, not for the sake of the poor or the planet, but for their own personal profit.
While the public was dazzled with daily accounts of melting poles and polar bears fleeing the far north for London and New York as harbingers of the tidal waves of melting ice that would soon sweep across the coastal cities; their pockets were being picked by the gangs of eco-criminals.
Substandard products were pawned off on customers by calling them Green. In the kitchen, lower quality paper could be used in paper towels while more dish detergent had to be used to wash the same amount of dishes so long as the environmentalists were paid to certify the inferior products as Green.
And if the customers chose not to go along; the combined pressure of Green activists and corporations would eliminate any other option through regulatory mandates. Greenwashing compelled customers to pay more for less while the corporations and environmental consultancies pocketed the profits.
Once there was an expert and financial constituency in place to press for further changes; the third tier of large scale wealth redistribution could be unleashed.
The dreams of the Green criminals were modest. A worldwide carbon economy in which every human activity would be taxed, where everyone would need a permission slip to sneeze out some carbon in the spring and universal employment for environmental consultants with environmental impact reviews required for every single business down to the tykes with their neighborhood lemonade stand.
At stake were trillions of dollars; a dizzying amount that made the biggest financial frauds of the century no more than clumsy pickpockets lifting wallets.
To achieve these ends, the constituency had to be broadened with large scale wealth redistribution. Al Gore, James Hansen and a handful of bored college kids were never going to shake loose the insane sums of money that would make Green into the new Black and Environmentalism into the new Racism.
Enter the Third World.
Climate reparations bring poor countries on board by promising them billions for every island state that gets hit by a typhoon and every African warlord whose territory suffers from drought. If your weather is soggy or your wheat just won’t grow; blame the white man with his terrible industrial machine.
It’s the grandest crime of a new century that will outshine the massive welfare state looting before it. Twentieth century wealth redistribution was imposed by fear of race riots. Twenty-first century wealth redistribution however is being driven by threats of planetary annihilation.
The obscene trick of climate reparations is the seduction of Third World countries hit by natural disasters with promises of getting back on their feet with loads of cash stolen from the First World. Western taxpayers and consumers buy relief from the apocalypse and the Third Worlders become a wealth redistribution constituency demanding more free money in a system of blackmail and lies.
It’s the same scam that destroyed the Black community in America extended across the Third World. The welfare state did more damage to minorities than anything else. Now the Greens would like to repeat the process worldwide; pitting the First World against the Third World and profiting from the massive climate fraud that they have been slowly unrolling.
Radical regimes like South Africa, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia had already climbed aboard the “Bad Weather Reparations” express; but the global walkout from climate negotiations in Poland shows that the greed for climate theft cash has spread throughout the Third World.
The same crony capitalist dynamic that induces corporations to attack their rivals by supporting environmental regulations is playing out globally. China pushes for climate reparations by the First World while Western countries demand that China slow down the pace of its industrial production.
The hypocrites who congregate at these summits don’t believe the scams that they’re selling, but are exploiting them to handicap each other’s economies while their corrupt expert elites greedily predict absurd visions of doom that their own data no longer supports.
Global Warming has become a micro-economy and a macro-cult; a massive financial scam for a world financial system running low on ways to escape its collapse and a pseudo-religion for a secular world. These believer-profiteers are turning environmentalism into the new racism using the dead from every typhoon and weather tragedy as poster children for their terrible eco-scam.
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Don’t miss Jamie Glazov’s video interview with Daniel Greenfield about Obama’s Destructive Agenda, his Muslim Brotherhood Romance, the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin saga, and much, much more: